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International students are a key part of UK higher education institutions (HEIs) and account for an increasing percentage of total revenues across the sector as a whole (Barron, Gourlay & Gannon-Leary, 2010). Given this importance guaranteeing that international students fulfil their potential is a major concern of all HEIs (Morrison, Merrick, Higgs & Le Métais, 2005). The most common challenges faced by international students concern their English language skills, their ability to deal with higher order critical thinking skills and their willingness to participate in new social and academic discourse communities (Kingston & Forland, 2008). As a result of many of these challenges, students may experience heightened learner anxiety in face-to-face learning environments such as lectures or seminars, particularly when confronted by oral communication tasks in a foreign language (Yeh & Inose, 2003). They may also be disengaged if the pedagogical approach is more ‘form’ rather than ‘meaning’ focused (Carless, 2012). Through advances in digital technologies, research suggests that applications offering video conferencing and virtual worlds can provide flexible and interactive forms of course delivery that allow learners to engage with meaningful tasks in authentic environments (Hew & Cheung, 2012). Questions remain, however, about how these technologies can be used effectively with second language learners from diverse cultures in blended modes of delivery.
This article reports on a study with a group of final year international undergraduates studying business communication in English at a UK HEI in which both academic content and English communication skills were central parts of the syllabus. A task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach was used as part of a blended mode of delivery to promote both authentic and flexible learning. The research is significant in that it a) addresses the role of blended TBLT with undergraduate international students attending a UK university for a period of one year, and b) compares the use of two applications—Adobe Connect (AC) and Second Life (SL)—with the same learners. The research was concerned with the following research questions: What are the strengths and challenges presented by each application in terms of aiding authentic task completion? How can the applications be used to support task-based learning in a blended format? Due to length limitations the paper will focus on the technologies involved in the task-based blended learning context and a later paper will examine the language learning potential in more detail focusing on learner transcripts.